期刊名称：General Internal Medicine and Clinical Innovations
电子版ISSN：2397-5237
出版年度：2016
卷号：1
期号：3
页码：48-50
DOI：10.15761-GIMCI.1000114
语种：English
出版社：Open Access Text
摘要：Background: The federal government spent approximately $3.6 billion to establish and promote health insurance exchanges. However, there has been limited assessment of public interest in health insurance exchanges, which could inform effective outreach campaigns to encourage enrollment moving forward.Methods: We used difference-in-difference analysis and also retrospectively measured relative search interest for the federal programs to evaluate temporal trends in online search interest for health insurance exchange implementation in comparison to implementation of other federal programs. We examined online search query data from Google Trends, a web-based resource for tracking Google search queries. We used aggregated online search volume for query terms over a specified time, normalized against total search volume over that period. Our primary outcomes were the difference-in-difference coefficients for relative search interest in 6 regression models comparing the implementation and post-implementation periods for the federal programs. Our secondary outcomes were return to baseline of search interest for these programs, and changes in search interest for the final month of open enrollment for the health insurance exchanges and Medicare Part D.Results: Difference-in-difference estimates of search interest associated with the health insurance exchanges were lower than Medicare Part D (pConclusion: Online search interest in health insurance exchanges was significantly lower in the immediate implementation period than in the three other federal programs, but sharply increased in the final month of open enrollment. Monitoring online search interest may offer leading information about health insurance exchange outreach efforts.
